Deerskin (Robin McKinley)

Genre: Fantasy
Year Published: 1993

Inspired by my success with Sunshine, I decided to pick up another of McKinley's books at my local library. I knew I was headed into completely different territory with Deerskin, but I thought I might as well give it a shot.

It was, indeed, very different territory. I still am not sure exactly what to make of Deerskin. On the one hand, the entire book was written in the highhanded, faux-old-fashioned, semicolon-heavy style of a modern author attempting to write something that feels like a fairy tale, and the broad arc of the story was telegraphed almost from page one, like a fairy tale would be. On the other hand, I was genuinely gripped by the narrative, once it progressed past the rape.

Yes, the rape: the entire book is centered around our heroine (Lissla) coming to terms (or, more rightly, failing to come to terms) with her rape by her father. The book is divided into three parts; the first is an introduction of sorts and then a long, long descent for Lissla until, at the end of the section, the rape occurs. The first part is permeated with dread and buckets of foreshadowing, which makes it awfully difficult to read.

The second part forms the meat of the book, but it doesn't begin promisingly: McKinley spends four full chapters with Lissla in a dissociative fugue, the existence of which forms the bulk of the narrative. Every other sentence is about her lack of memory, and it gets very old very quickly.

Finally, by the middle of the second part, the story becomes engaging and not impossible to bear -- not coincidentally, this is where Lissla's new life begins to shape itself. Things follow in a way that are fairy-tale-like, mostly, and even if it's a little thorny at points, it's very interesting and worth having struggled through the previous parts.

Where it all falls apart again, in my opinion, is the last chapter. I won't give away the plot by any means, but McKinley, in her more straightforward fantasy books (e.g. Spindle's End) is given to magically histrionic conclusions that are uniformly overlong and confusing. I had thought I'd escape that tendency this time, but no such luck. There's all sorts of nonsense about flame and blood and reflections and it 1) makes no sense and 2) is drastically different from the rest of the book (which relies only the faintest bit on magic).

I also want to mention, though I feel a bit petty doing it, that McKinley has a terrible habit of endowing her heroines with serious obsessions that seem to coincide with whatever she herself is obsessed at the time. Rose Daughter dedicates an enormous amount of narrative to tending roses; unsurprisingly, McKinley had just picked up the hobby herself. Deerskin, meanwhile, centers around sighthounds; McKinley's profile in the back concludes with, "She lives in Hampshire, England, with her husband, the writer Peter Dickinson, and three whippets." There is, of course, something to be said for writing what you know; however, there is also something to be said for pushing your own boundaries a bit.

Recommended? Meh. I think I would recommend it for a college-level class on "Rape in Literature" or something, but the average reader can give it a pass.

Sunshine (Robin McKinley)

Genre: Fantasy
Year Published: 2003

Robin McKinley usually disappoints me. My mother bought me The Blue Sword when I was young so I could read a good book about a great heroine. I got about twenty pages in before I had to put it down. For some reason or another, it was one of those fantasy books that I simply couldn't stomach (there have been a lot of them over the years -- any Robert Jordan, any Marion Zimmer Bradley, any Tolkien -- in fact I'd say I fail to read much more fantasy than I actually end up reading).

Later in life, I picked up Beauty, and I was blown away by this simple, beautiful little tale. It had its faults, but they seemed to be honest faults, as if McKinley knew they were there and decided they belonged. So I tried her other two fairy-tale rewrites, Rose Daughter and Spindle's End, and was both annoyed and disappointed with both of them. Both books twisted the original tales in ways I wasn't comfortable with, and McKinley seemed all too happy to natter on about the minutiae of the end results of her world-building exercises -- I mean, really, the amount of castle description in Rose Daughter alone! -- without ever really advancing a compelling plot.

So it would take a miracle for me to pick up McKinley again, it seemed -- until Neil Gaiman (who has never faltered, in my opinion, in either his own writing or recommending others' writing) posted in his blog a few years ago about McKinley's new effort, Sunshine. I finally got it over the holidays and opened it up about a day and a half ago.

Talk about a pageturner. Sunshine weighs in at a little over 400 pages, but I blew through it in only a little more than twenty-four hours. Part of this is because McKinley begins in medias res -- not at all her usual style, by the way -- and so for at least the first fifty pages, you're just trying to get your bearings. She very cleverly introduces the fantastical elements of the story one by one, so the reader isn't overwhelmed ("Wait, vampires? Wait, demons? Wait, magic? SLOW DOWN!!") and begins with a picture of our world in mind before more and more details are supplanted by McKinley's ideas about magic and "Others" (i.e. nonhumans).

McKinley seems to have done a 180 in terms of her ratio of description to plot; while we do get a good deal of explanation of otherworldly features of Sunshine's universe, we never have much of an idea of what anyone looks like, what our heroine's concoctions taste like (she's a baker by trade), or what the world outside our heroine's town is like. But the book is so plot-driven that I found it difficult to care that I had to make all these things up for myself. And the plot is good: those who are fans of Buffy the Vampire Slayer may find it derivative, but as I am not, I came to the table relatively free of expectations regarding the modern vampire tale.

My problems with the book were mostly peripheral, but I'll speak to them anyway: our heroine is not a social creature by nature, so I understood that McKinley kept the non-plot-related interactions to a minimum for good reason. However, the main character did have a family, and it was too much for me to suspend my disbelief that she would not speak to her mother (who works with her) once over the course of five months (about the span of the book). I don't think we get a single line of dialogue from the mother, which strikes me as ridiculous. Similarly, her younger brothers are barely there, just sort of hyperactive, teenager-cliche props. When McKinley busts her ass on characterization -- which she does for her main two characters -- they come to life. When she punks out, they fall completely flat. There is a middle ground, occupied by about four or five characters (the boyfriend, the stepfather, the landlady, the "good cop," maybe the best friend), but it's tenuous, and a little more work from her would have really brought them to a different level.

The book leaves ample room for a sequel, though on McKinley's website (which is rather frightening, and reinforces for me that you really mustn't put artists up on a pedestal when you admire their art, because they will only disappoint you) she categorically states that she will only write one if the idea "hit[s] the inside of the back of [her] skull," which in my opinion does not bode well for any of us left hanging -- by which I mean, all of us who read the book. McKinley leaves a lot of questions unanswered, far more than I'm normally comfortable with in such a long book. In reading, I didn't feel that she left information out because of laziness, but merely because of time and space constraints -- perfect territory for a sequel, the average person might say, but McKinley is emphatically not saying.

Recommended? Absolutely. Be prepared to be glued to it, though, and be prepared to be left wanting more -- much, much more.